Charles Townley and the Clytie

"Mr Zoffaney is painting, in the Stile of his Florence tribune, a room in my house, wherein he introduces what Subjects he chuses in
my collection. It will be a picture of extraordinary effect & truth."

Charles Townley, Letter (August 1781)

Born into a wealthy Catholic family, Charles Townley was educated from the age of ten in France, where he would live for the next
decade. Later, as part of the Grand Tour, he traveled to Italy in 1767-1768, 1771-1774, and 1777. Townley was fluent in French and Italian
and, as a contemporary remarked, "never spoke his native tongue but with some hesitation." By the beginning of his second tour, the artist
and dealer Gavin Hamilton had excavated Hadrian's Villa and was exploring other sites, discovering a number of important marbles for his
clients. Another, less reputable dealer with whom Townley had dealings was Thomas Jenkins, who had been born in Rome and also served as
the British banker there. That year, too, Pope Clement XIV founded the Pio-Clementine Museum, a new sculptural gallery to accommodate the
papal collection of antiquities. As a result, an increasing number of marbles were becoming available for export.

The most important of Townley's acquisitions are represented in Zoffany's painting Charles Townley’s Library, No. 7 Park Street,
Westminster, in which the sculptures are presented in the context of genteel and learned conversation. The
Discobolus was discovered at the Villa in 1791, the year after the picture was exhibited, and added some time later. It was Townley's
last major purchase; above it is his first, two boys quarreling over a game of knuckle bones (astragali) which he had acquired a
quarter of a century earlier for £400 (the price justified because the piece was thought to have been by Polycleitus, Pliny XXXIV.55).
There also is a cupid, satyr and nymph, drunken faun, bust of Homer, Clytie, the Townley Vase (which may have been one of several to have
inspired Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn), Townley Venus (which, to avoid heavy duty fees, Hamilton shipped to England as two separate
fragments), and Townley Sphinx. On his death in 1805, the collection was sold to the British Museum for £20,000.

That same year, the last of the Elgin marbles were removed from Greece. They soon would completely overshadow Townley's pieces, most of
which, now that a comparison could be made, were recognized to be later Roman copies. In 1816, when the British government was considering
the purchase of the Parthenon sculptures, a Select Committee was established to determine their value, both artistic and monetary. In the
words of the diarist Joseph Farington, "much conversation was had respecting the examinations of Artists & Amateurs respecting the
Eglin Marbles." Members of the Royal Academy were called to give their opinion, including the neoclassicists Joseph Nollekens, one of
the country's foremost portrait sculptors, and John Flaxman, the first Professor of Sculpture at the Academy. Nollekens regarded the
Parthenon sculptures as "the finest things that ever came to this country" and reckoned them "very much higher than the Townley Marbles
for beauty," which he considered "all completely finished and mended up," whereas "these are real fragments as they have been found."
Flaxman, too, when asked to compare them, replied that "I should value them more, as being the ascertained works of the first artists of
that celebrated age; the greater part of Mr. Townley's Marbles, with some few exceptions, are perhaps copies or only acknowledged inferior
works."

Richard Payne Knight, a leading member of the Society of Dilettanti, was not so enthusiastic. For him, even the finest of Elgin's
marbles, which he thought to date from the time of Hadrian, were "in the second rank" (and only some of them). More to the point, they
were "very much mutilated" and not in a better state of preservation, "which has always been considered as of the utmost importance."
Indeed, "a corroded, dirty surface" made them unsuitable for the decoration of a private house—to
which, the Committee observed, Townley had so perfectly adapted his own marbles. Nor did they have any value as "furniture," that is, as
furnishings. It was a dismal performance and Payne Knight's reputation as a connoisseur of taste diminished, as was that of the Townley
collection.

The Parthenon sculptures were acquired that year by the British Museum for £35,000, less than half of what Lord Elgin (who was heavily
in debt) had hoped to be reimbursed and, even then, the resolution passed by only two votes. In 1823, when the personal library of George
III was donated to the museum, it became apparent that more space would be needed to house it and work began on a new building for the
British Museum, the first wing of which was to contain the King's Library. Eventually, the marbles from the Townley collection were
relegated to former storage rooms, but even that space now is closed and only a few of its pieces
currently on display. The most important is Clytie, a Roman bust dating to about AD 40-60, which is in the original library wing,
beautifully restored as the Enlightenment Gallery (Rm. 1).

"No, the heart that has truly loved, never forgets,
But as truly loves on to the close,
As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets
The same look which she turned when he rose."

Thomas Moore, Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms (1808)

"I will not have the mad Clytie,
Whose head is turn'd by the sun;
The tulip is a courtly quean,
Whom, therefore I will shun;
The cowslip is a country wench,
The violet is a nun;
But I will woo the dainty rose,
The queen of every one."

Thomas Hood (1799-1845), Flowers

"I am born from the fertile field, flourishing of my own accord; the shining crown grows golden with yellow bloom. With the sun
in the west I close up, and open again at sunrise: whence the learned Greeks devised my name."

Aldhelm, Enigmata (LI)

Aldhelm cannot have intended the sunflower, as it would not be introduced to Europe for another eight centuries and, in any event,
heliotrope is a violet-blue flower. One wonders, then, if Aldhelm, who was Abbot of Malmesbury in AD 675, was more concerned with an
etymological riddle than a horticultural one.

Townley himself had acquired Clytie during his second tour of Italy in 1772 for 500 ducats, which he
variously noted as about £100, although he personally valued the bust at five times that amount. It was to become his favorite
possession. When forced to flee his threatened home during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, the Clytie was said to have been
the one piece Townley took with him, supposedly trundling the marble downstairs from the drawing room to his carriage, exclaiming "I
cannot leave my wife." A charming story, to be sure, a variation of which is related in the Dictionary of National Biography.
But likely it is anecdotal, as the slightly larger-than-life sculpture would have been far too heavy for him to carry. In any event,
Townley's home was not damaged, nor was he said to have ever kept a carriage.

Initially, he had identified the piece as "a woman
ending in a sunflower" or a "Bust like Agrippina ending in a Sun flower" but later, persuaded by d'Hancarville's
mystical theory of a universal creative force that he discerned in ancient art, in which Isis personified the passive means of
generation, Townley came to regard the figure as that of Isis herself, whom he imagined to be in the calyx of a lotus. Indeed,
"This symbolical composition comprehends much of the principals of the ancient Grecian Worship." (The diarist Joseph Farington
dismissed such a notion as no more than an "attempt to prove the lascivious designs of antiquity to be merely emblematic of the
creative power.")

The figure actually may be that of Antonia the Younger, daughter of Mark Antony and mother of the emperor Claudius. Nollekens
considered it to be no more than a portrait of the artist's model, although, given the quality of the workmanship, that is unlikely.
He was said always to have had a copy for sale, the last one sold to Townley's uncle for 100 guineas as a replacement for the original
purchased by the British Museum. At Nollekens' death in 1823, there still was a bust of Clytie listed in the Christie's auction
catalog of the estate sale.

Regarded by Smith at the time as "one of the most perfect and beautiful specimens of sculpture," no marble was more admired in late
eighteenth-century England. For Penny, Director of the National Gallery, the bust is "in such superb condition, that her antiquity
must surely be doubtful." In the catalog description for Fake? The Art of Deception, an exhibition by the British Museum in
1990, Walker argues that the bust is ancient, although "it is likely that much of the surface of the portrait was reworked to enhance
its erotic appeal." Presumably, this is why the piece was included. She reconsidered her opinion, however, in a symposium paper
coinciding with the exhibit and concludes that the Clytie, which had just been cleaned and carefully examined, was not recut, aside
from some minor restorations. Nor was there any reworking along the side of the exposed breast, which might have been expected if the
drapery had been cut to reveal a swelling bosom. Penny had said as much at the time in his review of the exhibition. "The whole bust
looks like a single unified invention—and not an ancient one." For him, Clytie's very perfection
and mysterious provenance precludes its originality; for Walker, the ancient Parian marble and traces of encrustation beneath the
lotus leaves, its antiquity.

The figure was known as Clytie because of its petalled base, which has proved to be such a mystery to art historians, and named
after the forlorn nymph in Ovid's Metamorphoses (IV.371ff) for whom "Excess of love begot excess of grief." Seduced by Sol
(Helios), Clytie was transformed into a violet-colored flower, her head always turned toward the god as he moved across the sky.

The heliotropium usually is identified as the small fragrant heliotrope or turnsole. Theophrastus remarks that the plant
blooms at the summer solstice (Enquiry into Plants, VII.15.1), Dioscorides that it is named for the leaves that turn toward the
setting sun (Materia Medica, IV.193), and Pliny that it turns with the sun even in cloudy weather, the blue flower closing at
night (Natural History, XXII.57). Given its own orientation toward the sun, the yellow sunflower (helianthus) often is
equated with the nymph but was unknown in Europe before its discovery in the Americas.

Painted in 1782, Charles Townley's Library does not have its
namesake at the center of the picture. Rather, it is Pierre-François Hugues
(self-styled "Baron d'Hancarville" and occasional pornographer) who sits so prominently at the desk, Clytie and an open book in front
of him. Several more are at his feet, possibly to recollect his four-volume collaboration with Sir William Hamilton, British envoy to
the Court of Naples, whose first collection of Greek vases had been sold to the British Museum a decade before. (The book at his feet
is a volume from Le Anticheità di Ercolano Esposte, which initially was bestowed as a mark
of royal favor but Townley had been obliged to purchase.) The two men engaged in conversation behind him are the paleographer
Thomas Astle, who nominated Townley to the Society of the Dilettanti, and, hovering over Clytie, the Hon. Charles Francis Greville,
the impecunious nephew of Sir William, d'Hancarville's former patron.

That same year, Greville introduced Emma Lyons, his new
mistress, to the artist George Romney and commissioned the portrait on the right—for which he
could not immediately pay, as a letter of 1788 indicates. Indeed, it was only this picture and one of his uncle, which had been a
gift, that he could afford to keep, which he did until his death.

Four years later, unable to maintain the beautiful young woman, he foisted her upon his widowed uncle who, smitten in turn, married
Emma in 1791. After the Battle of the Nile, Lady Hamilton would become the adoring paramour of Lord Nelson.

Romney was equally captivated by Emma, "the divine lady...superior to all womankind" (Letter, June 19, 1791), who painted his muse
more than two dozen times, the final sitting (the last of almost three hundred) in her wedding dress on the day of her marriage to Sir
William. In this portrait of Emma in a straw hat, she gazes coyly from beneath its umbrageous brim, looking directly at the viewer but
hidden in soft shadow, a demure but direct gaze that suggests innocence and coquettishness, the loose hair and enfolding arms, both
abandon and control. It was a bewitching combination that seduced Greville, Romney, Hamilton, and Nelson.

Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton, in a
Straw Hat (1782-1784) by George Romney. Greville insisted that she assume the name "Mrs. Emma Hart," which is how she was known in
society. She herself signed the marriage register as "Amy Lyons." If born in 1765, the year of her baptism, Emma would have been about
seventeen when this portrait was painted. The picture is in the Huntington Museum of Art (San Marino, CA).

Five days after the nuptials of Sir William Hamilton and Emma Hart, Horace Walpole wrote that "Sir William has actually married his
gallery of statues." The many "attitudes" or tableaux vivants, in which she had so skillfully adopted poses drawn from classical
sculpture, now seemingly brought his collection of marbles to life. But the statement also conveys the notion of Emma as yet another
object to be acquired by the connoisseur. Just as Townley referred to Clytie as his wife, so Hamilton's wife was his sculptures. Some
thirty-five years older than his bride, he well may have uttered Pygmalion's own prayer to Venus—

"If all we can require, be yours to grant;
Make this fair statue mine, he wou'd have said,
But chang'd his words for shame; and only pray'd
Give me the likeness of my iv'ry maid."

Ovid, Metamorphoses (X.274ff) trans. Dryden

The painting of Townley's library is by Johan Zoffany and in the Towneley Hall Art Gallery & Museums (Burnley).
Townley later was to drop the "e" in his surname. The Townley collection as it was presented to the public
was quite different from that pictured by Zoffany. Too, the artist's arrangement of the sculptures seems to have a sly, if not puerile,
salaciousness. Greville seems to be embracing Clytie, Townley's "wife," while the gesture is mimicked in the statue
behind him of a nymph fending off the unwanted advances of a satyr. And Clytie herself is situated so as to gaze down upon the open legs
of the drunken fawn.

Townley's residence in Park Street, which, in Nichols' phrase, he "so admirably adapted...to the reception of his marbles," overlooked
St. James Park. It now is located at 14 Queen Ann's Gate, designated by a blue plaque erected 180 years after Townley's death.

Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Earl of Elgin's Collection of Sculptured Marbles
(1816); Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1900) edited by Sidney Lee; Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson (1897) by John
Cordy Jeaffreson; Memoirs of the Life and Works of George Romney (1830) by John Romney; George Romney and His Art (1894) by
Hilda Gamlin; The British Museum: The Townley Gallery (2 vols.) (1836) by
Henry Ellis; Lives of the Founders of the British Museum, 1570-1870 (1870) by Edward Edwards;
"Biographical Memoirs of the Late Charles Townley" (1812) by James Dallaway; The General Chronicle and Literary Magazine, 5,
284ff; Ancient Marbles in Great Britain (1882) by Adolf Michaelis; The
Farington Diary, 1793-1802 (1923) edited by James Greig; Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (Vol. III)
(1818) by John Nichols; Nollekens and His Times (2nd ed., 1829) by John Thomas Smith who, disappointed with an expectedly small
legacy as executor of Nollekens' will, wrote a gossipy biography of his subject. All these older titles have the advantage of providing
much of the source material cited in later work.